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Related papers: Adaptive Memory Decay for Log-Linear Attention

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Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mutian He , Philip N. Garner

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the central paradigm in artificial intelligence, yet the core computational primitive of attention has remained structurally unchanged. Local Linear Attention (LLA) is an attention mechanism derived…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yifei Zuo , Dhruv Pai , Zhichen Zeng , Alec Dewulf , Shuming Hu , Zhaoran Wang

Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yu Zhang , Songlin Yang , Ruijie Zhu , Yue Zhang , Leyang Cui , Yiqiao Wang , Bolun Wang , Freda Shi , Bailin Wang , Wei Bi , Peng Zhou , Guohong Fu

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Continual learning agents with finite capacity must balance acquiring new knowledge with retaining the old. This requires controlled forgetting of knowledge that is no longer needed, freeing up capacity to learn. Weight decay, viewed as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Aditya A. Ramesh , Alex Lewandowski , Jürgen Schmidhuber

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Prateek Verma , Mert Pilanci

In-Context Learning (ICL) in transformers acts as an online associative memory and is believed to underpin their high performance on complex sequence processing tasks. However, in gated linear attention models, this memory has a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Djohan Bonnet , Jamie Lohoff , Jan Finkbeiner , Elidona Skhikerujah , Emre Neftci

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , T. S. Eugene Ng , Hanjie Chen

Despite the advantageous subquadratic complexity of modern recurrent deep learning models -- such as state-space models (SSMs) -- recent studies have highlighted their potential shortcomings compared to transformers on reasoning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Destiny Okpekpe , Antonio Orvieto

Increasing the size of a Transformer does not always lead to enhanced performance. This phenomenon cannot be explained by the empirical scaling laws. Furthermore, the model's enhanced performance is closely associated with its memorization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Lei Deng , Wei Han

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach